Instead of using National Guardsmen and private militias against striking coal miners, we should use National Guardsmen against private militias helping ranchers refuse to pay grazing fees. Nowthat would be real progress!

First of all, I wished I could share your optimism regarding completion of the tunnel. Considering that the machine got stuck after the first few hundred feet and has to be dug out from above, what’s going to happen in ten years or so when it gets stuck for the fifteenth time right under the foundation of Benaroya Hall?

And as to Magnolia…talk about a bridge that’s not likely to survive the next earthquake! That mess of emergency braces, clamps, baling wire and chewing gum by Pier 91 should have been replaced in the 1960′s.

I grew up in the Midwest at a time when the country still prided itself on having something of a conscience, when it was a place still built on hope and a widespread belief that a better future was anybody’s potential birthright. Inequity was always there, and there were always rich people and poor people, but not in the ratios we see now in America. What I found in my travels was place after place being hollowed out as wealth went elsewhere and people came to realize that, odds on, life was likely to get worse, not better. For most people, what passed for hope for the future meant clinging to the same flat-lined life they now had.

When I was a kid in Oregon, the lumberjacks and mill workers hung on this guys every word.

There, according to Clear Channel, he would anchor a new, all-conservative lineup of Republican-friendly talkers, including Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

Three months later, Limbaugh’s KEIB is a ratings disaster, coming in 37th place in the second largest radio market in America with a .5 rating share in March.

How small is KEIB’s audience? So small that 11 non-English radio stations have larger audiences in Los Angeles. And so small that KEIB actually trails four college-run, non-commercial stations in the market.

Ever give consideration to what that station was before Limbaugh started broadcasting on it?

It was a progressive talk show station with ratings in the tank:

The network announced today that Rush Limbaugh will shift from KFI, the station at AM 640 where his brand of right-winginess has been king for a couple of decades, and anchor a new conservative talk lineup at KTLK AM 1150. The latter station has been the local outlet for the progressive talk format, featuring liberal chatter and content from even further to the left. That will go away — along with hosts Randi Rhodes and Stephanie Miller — and the station will be rebranded as The Patriot 1150.
…
The move in Los Angeles “is a blow to liberal talk radio, which has long struggled to build an audience,” notes Real Clear Politics. “KTLK, once thought of as a potential competitor with KFI, now garners a fraction of the audience that KFI does.

@13
Financial collapses happened twice on Shrub’s watch; dot-com and housing bubble. Obama cleaned up the mess and the economy is slowly growing. What would have sped up the recovery is lower interest rates, but they were already still at historically low rates thanks to Bush’s first screw-up. And did I mention invading the wrong country after 9-11, and not going after the Saudi citizens who financed the attack.

Dot-com was GWB43′s fault? It topped in March 2000. Using today’s NBER definition of recession the ‘Bush’ recession actually began under Clinton. Nasdaq hit 5,000 under Clinton before sliding big-time. It’s only 4,100 now. So it became a hugely overbought bubble under Clinton and the return to reality was Bush’s fault?

It’s Bush’s fault that he couldn’t create sustained value in companies that had no profits and no realistic expectation of creating profits in the foreseeable future?

Wow, tough crowd.

That Long Term Capital Management meltdown in 1998. Was that Bush’s fault, too?

@15 Financial panics and collapses have happened repeatedly (and regularly) throughout American history. Whether government regulation and government interventions can prevent them can be legitimately; but it is clear that non-regulation and non-intervention is a failure as a prevention policy.

It is now generally thought that Alan Greenspan’s policies as Fed chair contributed (perhaps largely) to both the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, and subsequent busts. Greenspan was appointed to that position by Saint Ronnie, and reappointed by GHWB41, Clinton, and GWB43. Three Republicans, one Democrat who got elected by positioning himself as Republican-lite on economic issues.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of conservative economic theology or recent Republican economic policies. Our country is damned lucky that Obama, not McCain, won the 2008 election. While Obama’s response to the Great Recession was hobbled by an obstructionist GOP, what Keynesianism there was after January 1, 2009, is what kept us out of the abyss. The Republicans would have pushed the economy right off the cliff.

Long Term Capital Management was an example of Unregulated Capitalism (TM; pat. pend.) at its finest as run by The Smartest Guys in The Room (TM; pat. pend.). If you ask me, there’s something fundamentally unsound about a business that purports to make money with financial engineering (i.e. asset flipping) instead of making things or providing services; but who am I to question what Capitalists do, because I’m just a commie-liberal.

Our brain-dead trolls might argue I’m a hypocrite because I flip assets, too, specializing in assets called “stocks”; and it’s true I do that, which contributes nothing to GDP, but it’s not hypocrisy because I don’t defend or make excuses for the system that encourages it.

I’m a Capitalist, alright, because that’s the only rational thing to be when you live under a Capitalist System that bounteously rewards unproductive asset-flipping and screws productive workers.

If you were presented with a choice between being scissors or paper, which would you choose to be? When you have only two choices, one rational and the other self-destructive, opting for the rational choice isn’t hypocritical; it’s a matter of not being stupid.

“Chase Bank is closing the accounts of hundreds of people who work in the adult industry, according to multiple reports. … Chase faced a lawsuit last year from the founder of [a] soft porn studio … that alleged the bank violated fair lending laws for refusing to underwrite a loan on the grounds of ‘moral reasons.’”

correction @16: Whether government regulation and government interventions can prevent them can be legitimately debated; but it is clear that non-regulation and non-intervention is a failure as a prevention policy.

The Dot Com Bubble was the fault of Obamacare. Gingivitis is the fault of Obamacare. Begazie was the fault of Obamacare. Rush’s low rating is the fault of Obamacare. The War of the Roses was the fault of Obamacare. Uppity women are the fault of Obamacare. Questioning white wealth privilege is the fault of Obamacare. The TV show Friends was the fault of Obamacare.
Every conservative knows that everything bad in the world is caused by Obamacare.

@7
KTLK, that became the Rush Station is owned by Clear Channel Communications, Inc., the nation’s largest owner of radio stations. Clear Channel is now owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital LLC.

KTLK was a weak station that also carried Los Angeles Kings hockey games, UCLA football games, and other sports which often pre-empt scheduled progressive programming, and as a result ratings suffered. In the last years, the owners systematically stripped the station of local progressive talk.

Notice how the Cheap Labor Conservative fails to mention that Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital dumped the station’s progressive content, then said they had to change the format because the ratings sucked.

When you’re dead last in a 3-way GOP primary, you need to drum up some attention …

“The food stamp program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They proudly report that they distribute free meals and food stamps to over 46 million people on an annual basis.

“Meanwhile, the National Park Service, run by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us ‘please do not feed the animals.’ Their stated reason for this policy being that … The animals will grow dependent on the handouts, and then they will never learn to take care of themselves.

If Dr. Bosworth somehow got elected to the U.S. Senate — although it doesn’t appear that even South Dakota Republicans are that stupid — would she vote against raising the minimum wage and then accuse the working poor of being “wild animals” because of their “dependency” on food stamps?

The two Wisconsin TALGO trains are set to leave Milwaukee, destination unknown. Rumors circulating within the industry, and online railfan boards, is Michigan. Makes sense, Michigan has been funding intercity passenger rail for years, regardless of party in control in Lansing. Equipment similar to what Amtrak California uses is on order, but delivery is years away, and older, Amtrak owned equipment is wearing out.

The Fox Agenda. Good God, how they disrespect the Black Democrat President.

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